


In The Moment

by whitenoise27



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen, MSR if you squint, but you have to squint pretty hard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-07
Updated: 2018-02-07
Packaged: 2019-03-14 22:17:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,041
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13599558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whitenoise27/pseuds/whitenoise27
Summary: So Groundhog Day just went by, which naturally got me thinking aboutMonday, and what would happen if Scully eventually got the same sense of deja vu that Mulder had. This is what came out.





	In The Moment

As Agent Hammond’s voice drones on, Scully can almost swear she’s sat through this meeting every morning for a month. The thought is absurd, of course — it’s Monday, and she clearly remembers brunch with her mother yesterday after church. Still, she has the strongest sense of deja vu as she checks her watch for what feels like the fiftieth time and wonders where the hell Mulder is.

The other agents are wondering, too, and when Hammond flips from page 37 to page 38 of his crime statistics report, Skinner calls for a break and motions for Scully to join him outside his office.

“Well?” he demands after the door closes behind them.

“Sir?” She knows exactly what he’s asking but refuses to make it easier for him to treat her like Mulder’s babysitter. Mulder is a grown man and whatever Skinner may think, it is not her job to track him like a GPS at all hours of the day.

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know, sir.” It’s not like Mulder hasn’t ever attempted to blow off these quarterly meetings before, but something’s telling her that’s not the case this time.

Skinner practically growls in irritation, and despite her own annoyance at her partner, Scully feels defensive in the face of their boss’s wrath. Since her first case with Mulder, it’s always been the two of them against the world, and dammit, she’s the only one who’s allowed to be annoyed with him. She’ll defend him to the death against anyone else. “There was a problem at his apartment,” she says without thinking. “It’s flooded… a burst pipe or something. I’m sure he’ll be in as soon as it’s straightened out.”

“You’ve spoken to him?” Skinner asked. His surprise is understandable, since she’d told him an hour ago that she couldn’t reach Mulder, and the entire hour between then and now has been occupied by Hammond’s crime stats report.

“No, sir.”

“Then how do you know?”

Good question. She’s not really sure where that came from. “He’ll be here,” she insists.

Skinner looks at her for a long moment, then shakes his head. “You’ve been his partner too damn long,” he mutters and pushes his way back into his office a bit more forcefully than necessary. Scully stands where she is for a few more moments, glances at her cell to check that he hasn’t called, then turns and heads for the elevators.

_He’ll be there; he’s usually here by now._

The thought comes out of nowhere, and it makes her stop short in the middle of the hall, halfway to the elevator. It’s now pushing ten — Mulder is _always_ here long before now. What the hell is going on with her this morning? She shakes off the feeling that maybe Skinner was right (maybe they _have_ been partners too long), and continues on her way down to the basement office.

She’s hit with another powerful wave of deja vu when she walks into the office and sees him, still in his coat, hunched over his desk writing. He speaks without looking up, and she knows what he’s going to say before he says it.

“I know, I missed the meeting.”

“No, you’re just extraordinarily late for the meeting,” she says. “I’ll tell Skinner you’ll be there after you stop at the bank.”

“Thanks, I … Wait, how did you know?”

“You’re signing your paycheck.”

He points at her with his pen in a ‘nothing gets by you’ gesture. “The check I wrote my landlord for the water damage is gonna bounce if I don’t deposit my pay,” he explains as he finishes endorsing the check and rises to his feet. “Bank’s right down the street.” He touches her shoulder briefly as he walks past. “I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

He’s already out the door when she gets hit with a sudden vivid mental image. He’s lying on a cold marble floor, his shirt ripped open, her palm pressed to a bullet wound in his chest as his blood oozes between her fingers. A voice that’s not hers echoes in her mind, warning them away from the bank. Before she can fully process what it means, she’s following him out of the office. “Mulder!” Her irritation with him drains away as he turns and she’s suddenly eye-level with the pale blue of his shirt, pressed and whole and unstained. Maybe the deja vu and the premonitions are nothing, but they just got the x-files back and she’ll be damned if she’s going to lose him now. “Skinner’s already pissed enough,” she says. “Go give him your report. _I’ll_ bring your check to the bank.”

He regards her for a moment, then nods and hands her the check before retreating to the office to retrieve his report. After he leaves, she stares at the slip of paper in her hand. She’s tempted to just avoid the bank entirely, call Mulder’s landlord and ask him to wait a day or two before cashing the check for the damage. But she can’t. Law enforcement is her job, and if something bad _is_ going to happen at the bank, she needs to be there to stop it. And since when has she believed in hunches and premonition, anyway?

“Nothing’s gonna happen at the bank,” she says out loud to herself, and starts making her way towards 8th Street. She’ll go, deposit his check, and return to the interminable meeting that will be made slightly more bearable by the fact that Mulder will now be suffering through it with her.

 

Twenty minutes later, the check is crumpled in her clenched fist and the meeting is put on indefinite hold. If it didn’t hurt so damn bad, she’d laugh at the juxtaposition of her lying on the cold marble floor with his palm pressed to her sternum, her blood oozing through his fingers, his voice pleading with the robber. Bernard reveals the bomb, and she has the ridiculous urge to ask Hammond what the odds are of two federal officers dying in a bank robbery while they’re supposed to be sitting in a meeting on crime statistics.

Mulder shouts a desperate denial, and she just barely has time to register the deafening blast before everything goes black.


End file.
